Susan "Spark" Park

I invented the 5A Framework for GTM to easily communicate a nd keep track the top objectives of a Go-To-Market plan. 1. Audience: You must understand your target(s), and how it will be best to approach them. 2. Angle: What is your message/angle. This will tell your audience(s) how you solve a problem. 3. Accomplishments: Your goals and milestones 4. Activate: How will you execute your plan? 5. Assess: Evaluate and adjust If your GTM has all of these five elements you have a solid overview of what your GTM will deliver. It also creates real-language objectives for your GTM vs using our jargon like core-value proposition and other product-led language. This has been a very handy framework for me to deliver the executive summary of the GTM, especially to executives who are unfamiliar with product marketing and haven't seen a full GTM strategy for their business before. Many product marketers focus on the Activate more than the other A's, but if you do, you run the risk of just running a launch and a campaign vs holistically driving growth and adoption of a product. A lovely exercise to ensure you have the 5A Framework covered is the work backward exercise that Amazon employs. The A's will have your GTM in a solid place. So rely on them to ensure you're not getting too mucked up in the details. 

I have started to ask "What is the biggest trade-off decision you had to make?" Most people go straight to themselves and a trade-off that they've had to make about a job or career path, not a company decision. One interviewee floored me when he talked about hard decisions on needing to lay-off members of his team, but then described how he worked through his network to get every person on that team a job at another company. Not only did he show he could make tough calls, but he was trying to be a good person too in a rough situation. 

Accomplishments or goals: This is a critical A (please refer to Spark's 5A Framework or other answers) that can be very hard to figure out, but it's worth the time to build them. I like to think of KPIs in two buckets: 1. New/nascent products need to drive Retention. Set up your Acccomplishments to focus on retention, and after you have that - you can push growth and start heavily investing in marketing to drive growth. * If you aren't retaining customers, then there is no need to focus on anything else. You do not have product-market fit because people are churning from your product. * You're still in alpha/beta mode because you are not holding a cohort of users for longere than 7, 28, 90 days+ (yes look at it from multiple lengths of time) to help diagnose how to make the product sticky. This is why mobile games can go through months of soft launch to figure this out. * Try to set up a "bare minimum" threshold of users you want to retain. Do you need 5k-10k of retained users to understant if the product is working? Make sure you've talked to product and your business teams to figure out what is a statistically significant number of users you want to hit to understand your retention curves, and whether or not you can afford to acquire them. I know of a lot of teams who invested in growth too early, before their product was sticky and churned through a ton marketing spend and even marketing employees driving growth into a product that churned users. Don't take growth alone in a new/nascent product. Retention will be the most important thing in the beginning. 2. Retentive products need to drive Growth. If you have retention down then your GTM strategy shifts from changing behaviors to getting more people into your product so they are in the habit-loop of retention that your existing users have. * This is when you know your product is sticky enough, and it's time to invest to find more users and new audiences who can use your product. * When you launch features in existing products, if they're large changes, you may also go back into retention mode. Ex) You launch a new user experience within a big product suite, you could take it back to be a nascent feature. As for cadence - after you set your accomplishments (goals), you should be checking in on them on a weekly basis in your GTM/Commercialization meetings. Once you feel like you have a set of findings and trends (I like to do this after 90 days) you can present/address them with product if they haven't learned about them already. You are constantly the source of aggregated user behavior so do not skip over these important Accomplishment/metrics is your GTM. 

I built the 5A Framework of GTM for this question. :-) I know where you're coming from. You're proud of your incredibly, detailed GTM, but you need to present this plan to your GTM team, and you're in a sea of product documents and spreadhseets and you're unsure of what points to bring up. Create 5 sections with each of these A's, and you'll be surprised how holistic the GTM story is, and the quality feedback you will get back to pivot the GTM if need it. This is why 1. Audience: You must understand your target(s), and how it will be best to approach them. This can open eyes on who the product is built for and if you're going after an existing customer base or expading into a new customer base. This can start landing whether or not you're driving growth or retention in your accomplishments or goals 2. Angle: What is your message/angle. This will tell your audience(s) how you solve a problem. This can address whether or not your angles/messages go along with the existing mission and other product suite. Feedback here is critical to understand if the product is in line with where the company is going, and this is critical to get buy-in. This also leaves room for your copy and marketing team to get very creative. 3. Accomplishments: Your goals and milestones. These are also critical to get buy-in. If you're gunning for growth you will potentially have commercial objectives to hit. Either way, these will be necessary to ensure you are positiong your launch in line with the success executives want to see. This can also focus the GTM team for the right areas, and drive the right channels to hit these Accomplishments. 4. Activate: How will you execute your plan? This is where a screenshot of the GTM checklist with highlights of your top channels and partners come in. If you're not getting push back on any of the Audience, Angle, or Accomplishments, this Activation plan will not need to change much. But if any of the preceding A's are changed, be prepared to change how you will Activate, which is why it's more tactics than a big discussion. Also if your channel team understand all of the A's, they will have great ideas of their own to Activate. Empower your team with knowledge with the 5A Framework. 5. Assess: Evaluate and adjust. This will come in a post-launch and your plan of tracking. Everyone needs to be onboard on this for when you will regroup and what success/good looks like. This will enable the whole team to learn from each other and adapt better for the next launch. If your teams don't all understand this at a high level, it would be very hard for them to have agency in their contribution to the GTM. So ensure everyone has this undestanding so they can brainstorm how the best to hit these goals in your launch. 

We're going to need to shift from a meeting-first GTM strategy to webinar-first and content marketing strategies in B2B. Consumer GTM will need to remove an events, tentpoles, etc as well, but I see more of the B2B space being affected by the lack of facetime with their clients. We've already been evangelizing a more scaled approach to our marketing as Gaming has grown in prominence and more and more indie developers and markets are growing, but this will be more and more critical. I think content marketing is an under-valued channel. Currently, I feel like I'm working with an incredible thought-leader and passionate Gaming marketer, Karis Ng, and she's really up-leveling our game. If your content/product is good it will spread, and we will need to invest more and more into this as the webinar channels get noisy. 

Expected: * Working with multiple timezones * Language barriers/poor translations * Cultural issues * Getting individuals to focus on the team dynamics so we can work as a global unit * Countries/regional teams coming up with their own narratives and strategies. Unexpected * Distributing the work so each person on your team can shine with a strong project to drive visibility, especially if they're not inherent good ways of working in the region. * Memes are incredibly quick to spring up and hard to squash. A meme will spread faster from one region to another than a global truth, so ensure your team is in the conversation so memes can be uncovered and recitified quickly. * Loneliness for individuals who are remote. I try to get adopted by teams around me or set up more purposeful socialization so I don't get too far removed from the culture of the office and the people I work with. Work loneliness can be a thing, and I try to combat it as much as possible.

I love this question. Instead of trying to convince them, I would listen to their concerns and try to alter the product to make it relevant, especially if the market has a strong track record of being right. If you can’t make the feature requirements in time to do so, cut the market from the launch. There’s no need to enter a market (translation resourcing, training etc) if you don't have stakeholder buy-in. You will have more time to focus on other markets with more opportunity. Also, nothing will make a market want a product more than seeing it be successful somewhere else.

Instead of a "vertical focus" go forward with a New Audience focus so you can leverage the 5A GTM framework , and ensure you're thinking through a consumers' need. Also, if you focus on a new user, you can also employ the "Job to be done" framework, which can help narrow what the customer really wants to get done and how your product can satiate that need. After you establish those jobs (UXR) you can use market research and even analytics to scale out the size of these jobs and what could bring in the most users. Always put people first. Market research, user research and analytics (data trends) are you sweet trio of fantastic insights that can help you figure out the new Audiences to expand your product.

If you have global projects or have syndicated a regional product to the global level, I would think that experience is relevant. If you are a regional product marketing manager and do not have a project like that to speak of then work on getting one. This will help with your own visibility and help the company projects succeed. If you want this experience and you’re already in product marketing you can network in the company to try and make that happen for yourself. Then in the interview/vetting process you can speak to these projects and show that you do have global experience, despite not having the job title. Otherwise, if you can show you influenced the product team from a regional perspective it would be HUGE. I have seen regional product marketing teams focusing on influencing their own markets versus rolling up the feedback and driving change at the global product level. The latter is more impressive to me, and shows me you could be a product leader. 

Sharebird is a fantastic network. It’s wonderful to see communities sprout around this fun and challenging career path that can lead to a variety of successful positions. Use your network and ask questions as much as possible.